April 16, 2025                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

To celebrate this year’s Tax Day, our colleagues at the Institute for Policy Studies National Priorities Project have just released a damning new comparison of where all our federal tax dollars are going.

One eye-opening stat from this new report: In 2024, the average U.S. taxpayer shelled out $3,707 for weapons and war. That sum included $388 for the top five Pentagon contractors. In contrast, only $149 of every average person’s tax dollars went to the National Institutes of Health and its life-saving medical research.

The lesson from numbers like these? We clearly need to be doing more, as a nation, to make sure our rich are paying their fair tax share. But ensuring that our collective resources are improving all our lives remains equally essential.  

A pause: Our co-editor Sam Pizzigati has for years been writing a Too Much column for Inequality.org. He’s also now working on a new book with Institute for Policy Studies analyst Bob Lord, a look into the future enticingly entitled The Last Billionaire. To help Sam finish that work, Too Much will be going on a brief hiatus starting next week. We look forward to a Too Much return this summer!

Chris Mills Rodrigo
for the Institute for Policy Studies’ Inequality.org team

This week’s frontline face: Quinn Slobodian, a professor of international history at Boston University and author of Hayek’s Bastards, a new analysis out this week from Zone Books.

What he’s doing to help tell the story of this moment: Slobodian, a historian of neoliberalism’s forces and faces, has traversed the troubling worlds and archives of outfits ranging from anti-statist think tanks and race “scientists” to Silicon Valley techno-feudalists and online fearmongers.

Slobodian’s work has helped explain how “many of the prominent leaders of the far right” actually amount to “radicalized capitalists” who seek “to accelerate” our world’s “dynamics of competition and rivalry in a new way.”

What makes this work so important: An accurate history of ideas equips us to find coherence in the chaos of the news — and to fight back against forces that strive to see our state “sleek, shackled, or shattered.”

Don’t Privatize the Postal Service — Expand It To Meet Today’s Needs

President Trump and Elon Musk have expressed interest in selling off the U.S. Postal Service to for-profit corporations, at a time when FedEx and UPS package delivery rates are regularly running 25 to 60 percent higher than USPS rates.

Without competition from the public Postal Service, these private carriers would be able to jack up their rates even more — or deny services altogether to people who live on less profitable routes. 

A new Institute for Policy Studies report analyzes the ZIP codes where UPS and FedEx are already charging extra for deliveries and where rates will likely skyrocket if Trump succeeds in privatizing USPS. More than 100 million people live in these areas, places that range from rural towns to many suburbs. 

We shouldn’t be selling our public postal treasure off to the highest bidder. We should be strengthening USPS by investing in new services that also raise revenue. USPS, for example, could provide low-fee ATMs and check cashing and could also be contracting with local governments to gather public safety and environmental risk data through monitors on delivery vehicles.

Letter carriers, for their part, could be providing check-in services for elderly and disabled residents, as they do in other nations. Read more at the link below. 

Our richest 1 percent now own 50 percent of U.S. stock and mutual funds, up from 40 percent in 2002. The recent financial market chaos is no doubt giving this elite group heartburn. But shed no tears for our richest. Most of them remain wealthier today than a year ago. For an interactive version of this chart and more on wealth inequality, click the link to our Inequality.org Facts section below.

A Welcome New Perspective on America’s Federal Tax Future

Since the late 1970s, as the Economic Policy Institute has detailed, only Americans of substantial means have been sharing in Corporate America’s economic bounty. How can we change this top-heavy state of affairs?

Last week, at an unusual conference in Washington, D.C., activists highlighted a detailed agenda for making America start working for all Americans, not just the wealthiest among us. What made this confab so unusual? The people who put it together all just happen to rate as wealthy themselves. Inequality.org co-editor Sam Pizzigati has more.

For This Massively Paid Media Mogul, a Trump-Time Fizzle

This week’s dour deep pocket: David Zaslav, the top exec at media giant Warner Bros. Discovery.

What has Zaslav sour: Certainly not his compensation. Zaslav’s CEO pay, we learned last week, totaled $51.9 million in 2024, up from $49.7 million the year before and a whopping 398 times the pay going to his corporate empire’s median employee. His latest windfall has come at the same time that his empire’s cable outlets — most notably, CNN — are showing sinking ratings and ad revenue.

Last November, Zaslav welcomed Donald Trump’s election victory. That triumph, he announced, could speed “deregulation” and help bring a “consolidation” in the entertainment industry that could bring “a real positive and accelerated impact.”

The actual Trump impact on Zaslav’s empire has been anything but. Zaslav last week ordered, “effective immediately,” the cancellation of all employee travel “not business-critical,” blaming “market volatility and reduced consumer confidence” for the belt-tightening.

The last word: Warner Bros. Discovery’s share price ended last week under $8, down 37 percent from its most recent 52-week high.

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